Recently I was asked to setup a home theatre center using an older Pentium 4 computer and a Sony 40in crt televison, theoretically high definition. I managed to find an old video card with DVI port which connected to the TV. I thought I had it made. I started with Slacko 5.4 and it worked in 640x480 but when I played a video file with Gnome Mplayer there was a major lag between lips and sound. I started trying other Puppies with same results until I tried my old barebones431 with the ch4-gxine-0.5.9b.sfs. Ran perfectly full screen with no hesitation.

Edit: I just uploaded wary-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso which is the same as the other except I ran it through the babybuilder in woof. This stripped out 17MB of drivers and modules, very impressive BK! Comes in at 66MB. However if this one won't run on your hardware you should use the larger model.

Edit: I just uploaded racy-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso. This one comes in at 68MB thanks to the magic of BK's babybuild and XZ compression which I forgot to use before. As above it may not run on your hardware (although it runs on all of mine).

Edit: I just uploaded wary-5.3-BABYbarebonesXvesa.iso. This one only has the Xvesa video driver but it boots right to desktop, no fooling around with the Xorgwizard.

I took a few liberties. I included a few right click options that I find essential, edit-sfs, untar pet, sfs-load, run_in_terminal, dir2pet, dir2sfs, dir2tgz. I also made leafpad the default texteditor, its actually a smaller less dependent one from Puppy4. There are two icons to the left of the menu button on the jwmtray which restart and shutdown. And I modified PPM so that packages you download will get stored in /root/Downloaded_Packages which you can move to wherever you want and link back into /root.

Ive had a lot of fun playing with these two. Im using a portable version of FreeOffice which resides in a folder on /mnt/home so I have rewritten /usr/local/bin/defaultwordprocessor to

Code:

exec /mnt/home/freeoffice-en/textmaker "$@"

, similarly with defaultspreadsheet.

For a browser Im using Opera which I simply downloaded and extracted onto /mnt/home, renamed the folder opera-latest and then rewrote /usr/local/bin/defaultbrowser to

Code:

exec /mnt/home/opera-latest/opera "$@"

.

For my mediaplayer I use tempestuous xhippo-3.5-gtk2.pet which is really just a filemanager. You configure it to open different filetypes with different programs. Ive got it opening video files with mplayer which I extracted from Mplayer-nodeps.tcz which at less than 1MB and no dependencies is pretty lean. It opens mp3s with madplay, aus with aplay and wavs with wavplay.
My /usr/local/bin/defaultmediaplayer just says

Code:

exec xhippo "$@"

. Likewise defaultaudioplayer.

Actually Im just killing time writing all this while my files upload, my connection is pretty slow. I hope you enjoy playing with these. Let me know what I screwed up and if you have any questions feel free to ask

Cheers, J

###########################################

BareBones Puppies Notes:

Printing:
To print on a network you should only need to install a Cups package.

To print to a usb computer you will need a minimum of Cups, Foomatic, and Ghostscript. Some programs will need more than this to print but the ones I am using are happy with that.

PDF Files
Epdfview needs Poppler and Ghostscript. This is the smallest Gui based printing PDF program I have found. (Correct me if I am wrong, Please!)Last edited by jrb on Fri 19 Jul 2013, 09:52; edited 7 times in total

Did you mean that Freeoffice and Opera are built into the iso, or can be installed afterwards?

No, they're not in the ISO. Both Freeoffice and Opera can be run portably. That is to say you just download them, extract them where you want, cd into their folders, click the executable and they run.

I extracted them onto my harddrive (ext4 - dont know if this would work on ntfs) and then ran them. One note about FreeOffice, if you run it this way it will build its configuration files in /root unless you create a new empty file called /freeoffice/portable.txt. It will then keep its configuration files in /freeoffice and you will be able to run it from any Puppy without having to reconfigure.

Opera keeps its configuration files in its own folder unless you run the install script. One thing to be aware of if you're using Opera with these barebones puppies, later flash versions need libs that are contained in Firefox or Seamonkey to operate so you will have to extract them from one of these browsers and supply them. I use flashplayer10_070208.pet which doesn't require these libs.

Sounds like a good project. You promote several ideas here which are good references.

You share how to setup the system for running to your TV. And you share how to take some Linux applications and running them without the system knowing about this (which is what the PPM attempts to track).

On your issues with video I have to ask your thoughts on

Was the issues you found with sync being one of the player package you were using or one of codecs?

And, instead of juggling distros, would a better suited video player have provided adequate results?

I ask that because something akin to CPU usage or akin to OS behavior when driving video is something you may have seen which made you look for other distros to drive the TV.

But, this is a very good project that has usefulness in using TVs with PUPs being the source for the media that is played. I sure others, too, find this useful.

One other question about how to get the TV to "show" your stream from the TV:

Did you have to simply connect the cable or was there a channel on the TV or ??? (Since it appears that you may have used a DVI cable for video and audio cables for sound.)

Trying to determine if you had to do something at the TV to "tune" to the PC for the PC's content.

Thanks for what you are showing us, @JRB; thanks._________________Get ACTIVE Create Circles; Do those good things which benefit people's needs!
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Thanks for this. I'll try to make your barebones wary into a base for databasing -- and see what happens !
Have a great day !
BFN.

musher0

I hope it works well for you! What database are you using?

I'm just in the process of uploading an even slimmer version of Wary-5.3. I took the barebones and ran it through the BABYbuilder in Woof, now a very slim 66MB.

Cheers, J

Thanks for your good wishes. For the past month or so, on the French-speaking side, there's been a main thread about tools for micro-business that can be easliy integrated as an sfs or (big) pet package for Puppy, and a couple of satellite threads about more technical aspects of personal databasing.

It all started as a dare, because a forum member had said that Puppy could not be used as a business distro. Another feillow replied that trying to use your Puppy for business was certainly more productive than spending your time playing dress-up with your Puppy doll ! A thread was born !

I suspect there could be a LO templates edition, a java apps eidtion, and a more traditional SQLite / csv edition. But it's too soon to tell, the subject is so broad. In any case, if anyone's interested, there's a TOC in the first post, here : http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82649 Everybody welcome, btw, despite the language barrier.

Just a note : in wary barebones, you left the planner / project manager, but removed its library ? Ouch.

I just uploaded racy-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso. This one comes in at 68MB thanks to the magic of BK's babybuild and XZ compression which I forgot to use before. As above it may not run on your hardware (although it runs on all of mine). If that's the case just use the larger barebones build.

Hi jrb, I am trialling wary53BABYbones (EDIT: silly me, its actually RacyBABYbones I'm using) and am looking for a suitable mediaplayer to view flv files. Most of the ones I tried to load from the PPM are asking for xine.lib (and or others too..)
Do you have any recommendation for a lightweight flash player?Last edited by greengeek on Sun 03 Feb 2013, 18:24; edited 1 time in total

Hi jrb, I am trialling wary53BABYbones and am looking for a suitable mediaplayer to view flv files. Most of the ones I tried to load from the PPM are asking for xine.lib (and or others too..)
Do you have any recommendation for a lightweight flash player?

Here's the one I've been using, MPlayer-svn-gtk2-0.5.pet It's a conversion from a TinyCore .tce and so far has played everything I've asked it to with no deps other than gtk.

Give it a try, JLast edited by jrb on Thu 31 Jan 2013, 12:10; edited 1 time in total

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